My baby came into the world wanting a 4th trimester. How did I know? He cried incessantly, nursed voraciously when he finally found the breast, disliked the car, stroller, blender, lawn mower, restaurant, strangers, sunlight, wind, the doorbell, the telephone and being rocked in a rocking chair back and forth.
In the countless articles and books about how to “soothe a crying baby,” there is little or no mention of this. Many doctors, authors and other experts talk extensively about hunger and gas and fatigue, even loneliness, but nobody explained that my baby might just have had a sensory assault to his system having left the cozy womb because his nervous system wasn’t organized for this world just yet.
I can remember how anxious I felt during these first weeks when “nothing I did” seemed to “work.”
And then, I realized.
Nothing was going to “work,” because it wasn’t about making him stop crying--it was about understanding what was causing him such stress and finding ways to let him know I was there for him even if I couldn’t always make it better. Because there were those crying jags when I held him close and nursed and walked and sang and breathed and still, he cried and cried and cried.
These moments play tricks on a mother’s confidence. It isn’t that our baby doesn’t like us or approve of our “ability” to mother, but that, this is a chance for us, as control freaks, to stop making everything a problem we need to fix and start exploring the art of surrender.
The art of surrender is an act of compassion--for ourselves, first and foremost. When we hold that kind of feeling for ourselves, our babies “feel” it too. We hold them slightly differently. We breathe differently. We may stop “bouncing” them so much and start finding more fluid movements that flow with their true needs. We find...synergy.
All this through...a baby’s cry?
Yes. But...
Our culture has a thing about crying. We don’t like it. It threatens us on many levels.
-
1)Auditory: We think it’s noisy. Shhhh! Quiet that baby down! It isn’t just strangers in passing, but us too. Some relatives may tell us that a crying baby is a sign of a demanding character. Sometimes, people in positions of authority come down hard on babies for doing what babies do when they’re distressed. Like the airline pilots who asked a family to leave the plane before pushing back from the gate because their 2 year-old was crying so loudly that it was deemed too disruptive to the passengers.
-
2)Emotional: We feel anxious and worried about crying if it triggers our own vulnerabilities and sense of helplessness.
-
3)Historical: We carry long stories about crying based largely on how our own cries were met.
-
4)Medical: We think crying is a sign that something is “wrong.”
The list goes on.
What does crying mean to us? What do we associate with it?
When I got my own stories clear about crying, I was able to “hear” my baby’s deep cry of stress when I’d rub his back to release pressure from his belly as he nursed and gulped air down too. I vividly remember, even ten years later, this tiny passing a-ha moment, when I consciously changed my voice tone during these stressful moments to a tone of empathy. I remembered how I lowered my voice a few notes, slowed down my cadence, and shared my words from the heart instead of my head.
“I know....oh I know....I hear you, my love...yes...it hurts....” while I rubbed and he cried. And after that first time when I Soothed with Empathy as opposed to Soothing with a Need for Results, his cry changed. It was less agitated. Less pained. His level of stress was reduced with my empathy, with my level of stress eased by my own empathy for myself. He sensed that I was working WITH him as opposed to putting pressure on him to stop fussing. It was if he knew I didn’t “need” him to be quiet and didn’t have any agenda for what I wanted him to “do.”
Over the months, we got to know him on a multi-sensory level, understanding how he liked to be rocked, from side to side in deep squats, how he liked music to sleep and close proximity and nursing when he might have otherwise developed other ways of soothing. It was the crying and responding in countless iterations and cycles that forged a bond of trust between us. Science tells us that this is a deeply neurological process, wherein our right brains communicate with each other, moment by moment, even through our missed cues and signals, to “find” each other and attune for optimal growth and development. To miss and dismiss the cries is to miss and dismiss the significance of this developmental responsibility. Our response-ability.
Our culture says a baby who self-soothes is already on the road to independence. Thousands of studies, articles, books and hours of research on attachment completely de-bunks this myth. The truth is, a baby “self-soothes” by soothing himself within the attachment--through the relationship-- rather than finding ways to comfort himself in the absence of it. Many parents feel that they are doing a disservice to their child if they don’t sometimes “let him” rely on himself for comfort. This is a mistaken belief based in fear rather than an intuitive knowledge that we, as human beings, thrive through a process of trust and security intimately woven into our selfhood just as we eat and breathe.
So, the question isn’t so much about how we can stop a baby from crying, but how we can start thinking that he is processing the big, bright, loud, vibrating, busy world he just came into, and that means parenting as if we just developed our own senses for the first time.
Copyright 2009 Lu Hanessian All rights reserved.
